Secretary Agent for Mediating Interaction Initiation

In recent years, the possibility that users might be interrupted by information systems has been increasing with the growing popularity of the Internet and the ubiquity of computing environments. However, the timing of interruptions is not controlled in most systems. In this study, we propose a secretary agent to mediate interaction initiation between users or human-computer. The agent appeals the request of interruption to user from other by controlling the character’s gaze at the timing of less cognitive load based on the interruptibility estimation. We confirmed the usefulness of the mediation by the agent.